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Topic: Some New Cuttings (Read 2576 times)

I just received some beautiful cuttings from a kind person on the Big island of Hawaii. It looks like they were cut when the plant was beginning to flower!

I haven't had much success with Ska Pastora before, but maybe three times is a charm. Right now, I have the cuttings rooting in water, rooting hormone, a small amount of H2O2, and perlite (you can see the jars in the background of one of these pics). Several days in, and the cuttings seem happy.

As a sidenote, I found this beautiful plant for sale privately on a certain familiar website called 'Cra**slist. It was mixed together with your more typical tropical plants (plumeria, hibiscus, etc.). The seller was on a different island, but he very kindly shipped a handful of cuttings to me for next to nothing. He could have simply walked away with my money, but needless to say, he didn't. I guess my point is that people who have a passion for plants tend to be good people -- as reflected in this board.

Personally, I have taken a different tack with salvia cuttings. They are water lovers, fer shurr. So I use a minimum size cutting, and keep it wet. If I change the water daily, I can usually root a stem node just in a cup of water. I've rooted 1 or 2 node sections with no leaf on them at all.

More usually, I will just bury a node or two of a fat stem with few small leaves in a pot of wet soil mix including some forest soil.

I've found that the more leaf there is on the clip, the more transpiration will take place, and after a point I feel this can stress the cutting. But then, I don't use any humidity chambers, just ambient outdoor conditions. YMMV. :e_smile: